Everything We Needed to Know about America’s Self-destruction, We Learned from HUAC!

Okay, we agree, the long gone House UnAmerican Activities Committee is as much a source of risible embarrassment as it ever was satisfaction. This, after all, is the committee whose members warned America of such communist code words as “hootenanny” and inquired into the possible communist sympathies of 16th century playwright Christopher Marlowe, (who turned out to be innocent). But even this gang that couldn’t shoot straight had its moments, such as showcasing Whittaker Chambers’s unmasking of the communist spy Alger Hiss, and yes, exposing the (subsequently lionized) “Hollywood Ten” as a cabal of Marxist agents of influence entrenched in the motion picture industry.

More recently, movies like “Trumbo” celebrate these selfsame communists, as though whoever connives to  infuse popular entertainments with Red propaganda is a reasonable subject for iconification.  This perceptual  distortion has been so tidily insinuated over the decades that anyone willing to name such individuals publicly, say Eli Kazan, is eternally blighted, even as the authentically culpable are slobbered over.  But who, nowadays, sows such confusion, and how?          

To reply, “communists!” is no longer entirely correct, unless the term’s proper understanding is adjusted to delineate the actions of those philosophically infected by communists. In other words, the working class citizen who rolls down his pickup truck’s window long enough to holler “Commie!” at an Antifa drone, or at the proverbial grandma in sneakers jiggling a Bernie Sanders placard, is technically inexact.  His targets are unlikely to qualify as communists in the traditional sense. Except in a few, extremely rare cases. few of this sort could mumble anything coherent regarding materialist methodology, or the theory of surplus value; neither, nowadays, could most advocates of “Marxist Feminism”or liberation theology. 

But this is a bit like insisting your uncle doesn’t have Covid because he’s contracted a variant.  The definitional niceties don’t make him any less ill–or the virus any less virulent.  Similarly, the mutated spawn of Marxist-Leninism remains hostile to basic Americanism, by which we mean the freedoms of the ballot, the bill of rights, the free enterprise system, individual movement and self-directed employment.

It’s not that today’s new masses are stupider than before–they’re just much better brainwashed!

It may seem as though we are saying that modern communists often do not recognize themselves and even those self-describing as such have little awareness of what that means, apart from signifying their polemical hostility toward the above-noted liberties. And to a large extent that is exactly what we mean. 

This is hardly to say the textbook communism of the 1930s-1970s has withered on the vine.  Rather it has become the vine from which springs every malformed ideation from the Weather Underground to Occupy Wall Street. To a considerable extent this explains the “horseshoe” consanguinities of the political Left and the so-called Alt-Right.  To locate descriptions of these essential commonalities, and identify their constituencies, one can invest considerable time studying numerous scholarly works on a wide range of pertinent topics, or, one can pull out a tattered, time-mottled publication issued by HUAC in 1949, when commies were commies, and McCarthyites yet to be blacklisted for objecting.  

Alger Hiss, guilty of communist espionage long before McCarthy roamed the land!

And with just a modicum of mental adjustment one can readily apply HUAC’s tips to the progeny of that era, and its evolved presence in American culture today.  Care to play? Here follows a selection of handy (and superficially corny) tips from the Committee suggesting how communists may be singled out, and with certain glaring exceptions, i.e., the allegedly-telltale use of the putative  code word “hootenanny,”(not included below), may be identified by certain characteristics that remain remarkably stable. 

We figure Billy Jo was a good American.

Granted, the booklet itself contains 100 such tips, but since everyone knows WOOF articles are always too long, we’ve chosen a bulleted set of just 20 questions to make our point, beginning with:

• 1. What is Communism?  An obvious first question featuring what we might deem an in-obviously broad response, i.e.: Communism is a system by which a small group of people seek to rule the world. Here we can envision shrieks of agony from college professors and Marxist dialecticians, but so far as this definition is objectively applicable, it isn’t wrong.  And so…
  
• 2. How do communists try to get control in countries they intend to rule? Answer: Legally, or illegally, anyway they can. CONSPIRACY is the banc method of Communism in countries it is trying to capture. Its first big victory was through bloody revolution. [But] every one since has been by military conquest, internal corruption, or the threat of these.
• 3: What would happen if communism were to come into control in this country? ANSWER: Every man, woman, and child would come under communist discipline.
• 4: Would I be better off than I am now?  ANSWER: No.
• 5: Could I go to school? ANSWER: You could go to the kind of school the communists tell you to, and nowhere else. You could go only as long as they let you.
• 6: Could I keep my job? ANSWER: No, you would work at what you were told, where you were told, for wages set by the government.
• 7: Could I leave my property to my family when I die?  ANSWER: No, because you wouldn’t own any property. All property would be owned by the state.
• 8: Could I belong to a church? ANSWER: In Russia, the Communist Party tried for thirty years to destroy religion, and failed. Then, they applied the same principles of internal control and subversion from the inside. They are already adding these techniques to American religion.
• 9: Could I start a business and hire people? ANSWER: No. To do so would be a crime for which you would be severely punished.
• 10: Could I teach what I please, or do research with academic freedom? ANSWER: You could teach only what communists authorize you to teach. Research would be approved by the party.
• 11: Could I vote communists out of control? ANSWER: No, no communist government has ever allowed that to happen once power has been seized.
• 12: But doesn’t communism promise poor people a better break? ANSWER: Promising more than can be delivered is an old trick…try comparing communist results to communist promises in countries where communists have seized power.
• 13: Why shouldn’t I turn communist? ANSWER: You know what the United States is like today. If you want it exactly the opposite, you should turn communist. But first, remember, you will lose your independence, your property, and your freedom of mind. You will gain a risky membership in a movement that is ruthless,, godless, and crushing upon all except a very few in control at the top!
• 14: What is the emblem of the Communist Party in America? ANSWER: The hammer and cycle.
• 15: What kind of people become communists? ANSWER: Taken as a whole, the party depends on its greatest support from teachers, preachers, actors, writers, union officials, doctors, businessmen, lawyers, and even millionaires!
• 16: Where can communists be found in everyday American life? ANSWER: Look for them in your school, your labor union, your church, or your civic club. Communists themselves like to say they are present on every battlefield for the human mind.
• 17: How does the party get money? At first the party depended on funds from Moscow, but nowadays it depends on endowments and  funds, donations, drives, dues, ad TAXES!
• 18. What is a fellow traveler? Are they important to the communists movement? ANSWER: One who sympathizes with the party’s aims and serves the party’s purposes without actually holding a party card. They are vital to communism’s spread.
• 19. What do communists call those who criticize them?ANSWER: Imperialists, reactionaries, Red-baiters, witch hunters, fascists.    
• 20. How can I identify a communist? ANSWER: It is easy–ask him to name ten things wrong with the United States–then ask him to name two things wrong with Communism.              WOOF’s helpful key to interpreting and applying the above information:

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  So yes, HUAC’s concerns are passed around nowadays as objects of  sneering derision rather than an enumeration of ways by which communist infiltrators may be identified. Does such infiltration and subornment continue in our own time? We contend that exactly the degree to which that notion strikes modern Americans as laughable, one can chart the degree to which that infiltration and subornment have succeeded. 

–ho, ho, ho?

Clearly, we are not ruled by Moscow (although Moscow keeps trying) and just as clearly, communism qua communism has fallen in Russia. But China and North Korea remain adamant promoters of communist espionage, while tyrants everywhere–including Russia– remain despotically collectivist. Communism also thrives in our university systems. President Obama made no secret of his appetence for Marxist affiliations in his memoirs, and his cabinet was not shy of citing Mao–or for that matter, decorating the White House Christmas tree with Mao’s image.

Once we consider expanding the definition of “communism” to approximate that given by HUAC in answer number one, we are better prepared to consider its gains across the decades. Whatever injuries are thereby done to precise categorization are insignificant to our immediate purpose. The fact was certainly not lost on Norman Thomas, leading American socialist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America, who famously either said or did not say, “The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism,’ they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Snopes says Thomas never said this, but whether he said it or didn’t say it, he was right.  And it might benefit the folks in the Snopes trailer to perceive the advances of anti-American culture and its attendant knaveries as achievements by communism’s shock troops; or the bow wave of a better camouflaged warship whose home port is wherever human  individualism is crushed.

Examined from this angle, there is a proper (contemporary) understanding of HUAC’s 20 warnings against expanding totalitarian collectivism, together with our reflections on its kindredship to the Red shade of Sovietism, or for that matter Putin’s imposition of fear-based authoritarianism. From Africa to Valenzuela, then, communism invariably conduces not to a dictatorship of the proletariat, but in every instance toward government “by which a small group of people seek to rule the world.”

2: As suggested, these sociopolitical saboteurs go about matters by any means necessary, whether by skewing election results, dominating an essentially disingenuous media, serially impeaching an American president on a wholly bizarre cavalcade of invented charges, or making certain that inconvenient news is either spiked, or derided as fake, as in “that’s been debunked!” The more firmly the Red Meanace establishes itself, the less subtle its methods.

3. Absolute control of the polity is and always has been the aim. To suppose this may result in something apart from abject servitude is the ongoing wish dream of liberalism. To suppose a once-free population might willingly and cheerfully submit to collectivism’s vilest dicta is the height of reckless sanguinity, or for many less benighted advocates, the deepest motivation for mass deception.

4. To be better off under such a system can be true only of the elites who paradoxically rule it. Subtly or unsubtly, collectivism at some level always requires the jackboot.  The slob who valued his unemployment is no happier to be shot for parasitism; the factory worker reassigned to baking learns the hard way of central planning’s obtuseness, and ultimately the college radical is no longer able to ponder feminist fiction (which no longer need exist); thus he is reassigned to studying seed production.

Abbie Hoffman–who in one of his overplayed harangues against America , complained about having to raise his hand in school to visit the lavatory. Imagine how he’d have fared in Red China.

Little comfort at present…

5. In other words, school may be attended, but only to the extent that it serves the state. Such students would have jobs doing what they are told to do and trained to do.  An irony of American education currently may be that abstract thinking and discussion provide fertile ground for subversive guidances, whereas education becomes strictly utilitarian and party-directed once those subversive goals are realized. A further irony is the bleak futures of America’s university elites who, with some exceptions, will render themselves obsolete once their student bodies are sufficiently subjugated–once colleges become mainly vocational–and subversive professors are replaced with soil experts and water-purification wonks. But knowing that this gaggle of sleazy intellectual provocateurs will one day be held in suspicion as superannuated tools of the socialist fait accompli, is little comfort at present.

6.You can keep any job the collective finds useful. And so could everyone else, like it or not. It is absolutely true that radical socialism promises jobs for all, but equally true that it insists on which jobs and will not abide objections. Unemployment will not be abided, once enough welfare recipients vote in central planning.

7. Do you own property now? What are your local taxes, and what happens if you can’t pay them? What if you fly a flag your housing committee disapproves of? What if your door isn’t the right color? Or shape? What if–well, you get the idea. Collectivism abhors private property, and its acolytes already make it difficult to bequeath it to whom we please, or to do so affordably. To whatever extent “liberalism” advances, so transfers of property become more difficult. In the ideal socialist environment, all property would be owned by the state..So, might as well cling to your apartments, young graduates!

Jeremiah Wright–godfather, spiritual mentor, preacher, and evident stranger to Barack Obama!

8. Of course you can belong to a church–preferably one that is already substantially under the sway of liberalism. Remember Obama’s spiritual guru, the Reverend Wright? Imagine his simulacra in every pulpit, except those occupied by save-the-fishies environuts who think God is a vegan and transform scripture into a variety of leftist homiletics, preferably set to acoustic guitar. Meanwhile, the ongoing infiltration of the National Council of Churches by actual communists (as in communists) remains an open secret, observable to anyone with Google. Church will ultimately teach communist principles, or be denounced and banned as right-wing reactionary hate mongers.

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